Some fighting, it is safe to say, would be met with at any early stage of social development.
Fights would occur with more or less frequency through sexual competition.

The known habits of primitive groups, as well as the habits of the anthropoid apes, argue to that effect, and the evidence from the well-known promptings of human nature enforces the same view.
It may therefore be objected that there can have been no such initial stage of peaceable life as is here assumed.

There is no point in cultural evolution prior to which fighting does not occur.

But the point in question is not as to the occurrence of combat, occasional or sporadic, or even more or less frequent and habitual; it is a question as to the occurrence of an habitual; it is a question as to the occurrence of an habitual bellicose frame of mind--a prevalent habit of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight.

The predatory phase of culture is attained only when the predatory attitude has become the habitual and accredited spiritual attitude for the members of the group; when the fight has become the dominant note in the current theory of life; when the common-sense appreciation of men and things has come to be an appreciation with a view to combat.
The substantial difference between the peaceable and the predatory phase of culture, therefore, is a spiritual difference, not a mechanical one.
The change in spiritual attitude is the outgrowth of a change in the material facts of the life of the group, and it comes on gradually as the material circumstances favourable to a predatory attitude supervene.
The inferior limit of the predatory culture is an industrial limit.
Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living.